On county fairs and mistreated workers
Labor Day Weekend evokes both memories and thoughts of those mistreated by Trump's purge
The America of kids’ livestock shows at county fairs is worth fighting for. (Unsplash photo by Kenzie)
In the weeks leading up to Labor Day a half-century ago, I went on a tour of county fairs in northwestern Indiana. It wasn’t just for fun: I had left my job at a tiny daily newspaper to become an Indiana congressman’s press secretary, and I was getting to know him and my new role as we traveled through the 14 counties of his rural district. He told me that he could get a good sense of what was on folks’ minds in an afternoon at a fair — plus, people whose hands you shake usually vote for you. So those encounters at the pork producers pavilion or the cotton candy stand on the midway amounted to smart Corn Belt campaigning.
Plus, county fairs are a lot more enjoyable than town hall meetings. You can see kids proudly showing the livestock they’ve raised for 4-H competition — pigs, lambs and calves, mostly. You can watch tractor pulls and axe throwing, lose money on carnival games and ride a Ferris wheel, and you will joyously eat county fair food — like the one great day when I think I ate roasted corn on a stick in Porter County, a pork chop in foil in Jasper County and then funnel cake in White County. Visiting the fairs during the annual August recess from Washington became a favorite part of my job, which was mostly very long days in the corner of a packed office across from the Capitol.
For four years, then, I was an employee of the United States government, and while you may think that politicians and their aides care only about re-election and partisan one-upmanship, I will always assert that most of the people I met in government really wanted to do good for their fellow citizens. Sure, our work was infused with politics, and we hoped to re-elect the boss, but there was a sense of mission about it, too. We were federal employees, and we understood that our responsibility wasn’t just to the congressman who hired us, but more to the nation and its citizens.
That sincerity of purpose was even more true of the people we encountered in the federal agencies: A lot of them had devoted their careers to the niche issue of their office, and their expertise was essential to shaping and executing the laws that Congress passed. You’ll find both strong and weak players in every workplace, of course, whether in the public or the private sector. But ever since my own experience in government, I’ve been frankly outraged when people mindlessly or maliciously denigrate public workers. Those attacks are boilerplate talking points for right-wing politicians, and executing on the anti-government rhetoric has emerged as one of the many ruinous policies of the Trump administration.
To be clear: There is no such thing as a “deep state,” and the notion that the government is filled with traitors to the public interest — people whose work can be jettisoned without harm to our way of life — is simply a long-running fraud. Of course, that’s a practice to which Donald Trump brings unique expertise.
We are already missing a lot of the work that is no longer being done by a shrinking federal work force, and the nation is poorer for the loss of the services of so many key individuals who have been singled out for professional execution by the MAGA epidemic. On this Labor Day weekend, amid bipartisan rhetoric that usually aims to evoke support for America’s shrinking blue-collar workforce, we also ought to take a moment to mourn the government employees who are being sullied, sacked and attacked by a spiteful and short-sighted Trump administration.
Not so long ago — time drags during the 47th presidency, don’t you think? — Elon Musk, on a mission for the president, slashed his way through federal bureaucracies, claiming that career officials were “getting wealthy at taxpayers’ expense” and asserting, without evidence, that some career officials were “breaking the law every hour of every day.” Trump told NBC News that he feels “very badly” for the 300,000 federal workers he claims to have laid off, but “many of them don’t work at all.”1
In just these first months of Trump’s Second Coming, the federal workforce has been shrunk to 1960s levels, by hollowing out or shutting down 11 agencies, terminating more than 8,500 contracts and 10,000 grants. Musk had promised $2 trillion in savings, but now the Department of Government Efficiency that he used to head claims only $160 billion in cuts.2
But even those savings are ephemeral, at best. While any data released by the Trump administration is suspect, the Treasury Department says that compared to the same period a year ago, the government by the end of July has spent $5.97 trillion, which is actually an increase in spending of $374 billion. That is, even as Trump has bragged that he was slashing spending, the government has actually laid out an additional 7 percent, year-over-year.
So if the workforce cuts don’t really save money, why do them? There are three reasons, and three kinds of cuts: First, those aimed at getting rid of programs Trump hates, like climate justice and diversity initiatives; second, cuts that are mainly performative, like slashing foreign aid as a mark of Trump’s resolve that America should confront the world with a fist rather than an open hand; third, targeted firings intended to rid the workforce of anybody deemed insufficiently loyal to the aging autocrat in the White House.
Along the way, tens of thousands of people who were doing the work of the United States have had their lives upended, and many have been personally targeted with vile and malicious invective.
This week, for example, the Trump administration fired one of the CIA’s most senior Russia experts for supposedly engaging in what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard called “politicization or weaponization of intelligence to advance personal, partisan, or non-objective agendas.” A couple of days later, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control because, he said, the agency was “in trouble” and needed him to “fix it.”
Thanks to good journalism, we now know that in fact the CDC director, Susan Monarez, actually lost her job not because of an agency in turmoil, but because she insisted that Kennedy’s vaccine policies contradicted scientific evidence; three top health officials then resigned for the same reason.3 And the CIA official whom Gabbard attacked — and outed, in a breach of security — lost her job, it seems, because her judgment ran afoul of the demand for loyalty to Trump over allegiance to facts.
If there was any doubt that capable service is now devalued in Washington, consider the fate of people who dare to raise questions about what their agencies are doing. Nearly two months ago, some 270 Environmental Protection Agency workers signed a letter warning that changes pushed by the Trump administration “undermine the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” EPA leaders immediately placed 144 of the signers on leave, and this week the White House confirmed that several had been fired.4 Likewise, after three dozen staffers of the Federal Emergency Management Agency signed a letter to Congress warning that changes there, too, were jeopardizing its ability to perform its mission, they were suspended.
The attacks on the federal workforce have nothing to do with competence. No doubt government can be made to work better, but that’s not what the axing of experts and the slashing of entire agencies is all about. And the consequences will be dire: In the gutting of the public service corps that has provided the American people independent expertise and reasonable judgment, we will be left with a workforce that largely prioritizes loyalty to Trump, whether it’s inspired by ideology or by fear.
And we must consider where we will be once this terrible period of American history ends — and there eventually will be, blessedly, a cleansing reaction to the excesses of Trumpism.
But by the time the political tide turns firmly against the excesses of MAGA, we will likely be left with a government that functions far less effectively and fairly than it has in our lifetimes. And the slander of public service that has been a staple of right-wing politicians for decades will probably become more nearly true, for we will be saddled with a diminished government, depleted of so many of the capable workers who have long taken on roles in public service.
Then we will have, sadly, the kind of government that is all that a careless nation can expect.
So on this Labor Day weekend, we need to consider how we can combat both the attack on the workforce and the cynicism that tolerates it.
To put it simply, we got into this mess because of politics, and it is by political action that we will get out of it. Trump won in both 2016 and 2024 based on campaigns marked by outrageous provocations and promises that he cannot keep, but his tenure in the White House was the will of voters. Turning America in a different direction will require many initiatives — notably, engaging with a messy media ecosystem to change the poisonous message millions of Americans are absorbing — but the ultimate objective will be met only through the hard and often unattractive work of politics.
That’s not a solution a lot of people welcome, because plenty of Americans don’t like the whole idea of politics or government. Only one-third of Americans trust the government, and nearly half do not, according to a report this month from the Partnership for Public Service. And a record-low 58 percent told Gallup this summer that they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American — a diminished level of patriotism at odds with historical trends in America. Younger people, incidentally, voice less pride in their citizenship than their parents or grandparents.
You can understand why Americans aren’t proud of their government, of course, given the Trump administration’s abandonment of so many of the democratic norms that guided the nation’s first 250 years. But it’s only by engagement that we can turn that around.
We who are old enough to recall the America that I witnessed at those county fairs often remember the nation as a place of good neighbors and a fair chance for all. But that nostalgia omits some of the realities of that imperfect society, which had waged a vicious and unjust war abroad and had long tolerated the malignancies of racism and government corruption. We emerged from that to years of hope and progress — as we can again.
It will take hard work, which is, after all, what we celebrate on Labor Day. So with those who have worked on our behalf in mind, let’s vow to do what we can to turn aside the venality and cynicism of this time, and restore the best qualities of America’s democracy. The work will pay off, I’m sure.
A county fair midway where, for just a day, you have to forget about healthy eating. (Unsplash photo by Ryan Grewell)
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ENDNOTE
THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address. I love to hear from readers.
-REX SMITH
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/03/19/federal-employees-trump-musk-hate-layoffs/82233377007/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/29/doge-impact-washington-spending-100days-00316587
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/fired-cdc-director-clashed-with-kennedy-on-vaccine-policy-2025-08-29/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/08/29/epa-dissent-letter-employees-fired/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert
“All cruelty stems from weakness.” - Seneca